Virginia picked up a 62-53 road victory at George Washington on Sunday at the Charles E. Smith Center in Washington, D.C.
Grad student guard Amandine Toi led the Cavaliers (3-6) with 14 points, including a key three-pointer with three minutes remaining. Junior point guard Taylor Valladay scored a career-high 13 points.
Sophomore guard Kaydan Lawson came off the bench to score 10 points with a team-high eight rebounds.
The Cavaliers trailed by six midway through the second quarter, but closed out the half on a 9-0 run to lead 31-28 at the break. The Cavaliers built up an 11-point lead in the third quarter, an advantage they also held with 7:47 remaining in the game. The Colonials cut the deficit to three points, 56-53, with 4:11 remaining, but the Cavaliers scored the final six points of the game to pick up the road win.
Nya Lok led the Colonials (5-4) with 26 points, going 10-of-17 from the field.
“This was a good one for us, a team win,” UVA coach Tina Thompson said. “We faced adversity, a lot of it, throughout the game, but we showed resistance, and that’s kind of what we’ve been talking about and working on throughout practice. In those games early on, once there was a little adversity, we were kind of folding a little bit or giving in more than anything. We’re learning who we are as a team and our personality is kind of showing through. We’re defensive minded. We are okay with being blue collar and grinding it out. That’s what we tell our kids all the time. If we’re having trouble scoring offensively, as long as we’re not allowing them to score, then we’re giving ourselves a chance. They’re starting to buy into that identity, which is great.
“From a staff perspective, we feel like that should come so easy and so natural to them. There’s a toughness about them that they kind of have to tap into consistently and we can do that. When we can do that, we give ourselves a chance,” Thompson said.
Virginia returns home to host another school from the District, American, on Tuesday at 7 p.m.
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Chris Graham
